The McCargar Place

I've always thought this little pasture--just a small corner on a big farm which is mostly devoted to wheat, corn, and beans--was the prettiest place on my route to work.

One more view of the former McCargar place. They, or their successors, built a house beside and up the hill from the barn (out of this photograph; see here for clues ); these trees marked the limits of the home's yard. When I moved to the area the house was still standing, but abandoned and in very poor repair; it was taken down around the same time the barn was buttressed.

I've shown you this barn before , but there it was being its usual photogenic self this morning when I rode by. So you're getting another picture or two. Besides, the way the cows watch the passing parade through those doors is just impossible to resist. So I grabbed the camera and shot a few--literally from the bike's saddle. Wonder if I've got any pictures stashed away from before the buttresses were added. I'll have to look....

Same location as the previous photo; this building also survives, even though the house which overlooked the pasture's been demolished. This is really just a cinder-block shed, but someone made an effort to make it look good.

Taken on a day rather like today, early in 2006, with my Minolta SRT-101. Rural Eaton County.... Same location, different angle .

Yesterday's cattle live in this structure. Or lived, I suppose, since both photos were taken nearly five years ago. This pic comes from the same early-2006 roll of film. I call this the "McCargar Barn" because they owned the property in 1896, which I learned from an old plat map. There was a long-abandoned house just up the hill from here--it would probably show at the extreme left in this photo--but since Joan doesn't recall it, it was gone by 1995. Before the current(?) owners added those impressive buttresses, it looked to be only a matter of weeks until the wall fell outward, taking the barn down with it. Glad they saved the place, but the setup still looks decidedly makeshift. Another, color, photo of the same barn , taken a few weeks before. With cows.

I was looking for a lone tree to set against this morning's dramatic sky, but came upon this barn while I was wandering around the local backroads. I've photographed the barn before, and have told what I know of its story once or twice. But you haven't all been reading my commentaries for years, so today I'll tell another version. John McCargar was an early Eaton County resident, and Roxand Township's first white settler, arriving from New York in 1837. A few years later he married Lucy Maxson, who lived a farm or two over from his. (Daniel Strange's 1923 pioneer history makes a joke of this, as by somebody's "county history" rules a man wasn't "officially settled" without a helpmate. This definition is nonsense, of course, and Dan Strange knew that.) Anyway, the farm stayed in the McCargar family's hands for several decades, and somewhere along the way they built this barn next to the now gone family home, which was beyond the shed on the edge this photo. When I first discovered the barn, probably 37 years ago, it was evident that the foundation wasn't holding and that the barn would collapse when that stone wall fell. The then-current owners fixed that with the buttresses shown here. But the barn's old, and seems to be in danger of a more general failure these days.

This old barn's managed to outlive the house which used to share this yard.